Music of the Spheres - Gypsy Mezzo, Handcrafted, Wind Chime, 38"

This is the 5 wind chime I have purchased from Music of the Spheres!! The others I have are well over 10 years old and are still chiming away!! I purchased this for our vacation home because I miss my others so much!! Well worth the additional expense. They will last for years!!

I purchased both the Mezzo and Soprano version of the Gypsy chimes for a very unusual purpose. I couldn't possibly put up wind chimes in or near my abode, because it is a small flat in a social housing scheme in Exeter city centre, UK. Instead I have started a project called 'Wind Chimes in the Wild - Symphonies of Wind Chimes and Nature', in which I take sets of wind chimes out to a reasonably wild and natural location and hang them up on trees to make fairly lengthy recordings of them as part of natural soundscapes - and similarly I take smaller chimes out to Cornish clifftops where I suspend the chimes on light tripods and record them with the backdrop of various sea sounds. You can read about this project and listen to excerpts from my recordings on my Broad Horizon Natural Soundscapes page (use a search engine to find it); you can also usefully search on Amazon.com for "wind chimes in the wild".I mention this because my own requirements and interest are different from most people's. What I had available to compare with these chimes were some excellent and equally well crafted wind chimes from Woodstock. What I found was that, yes, the Music of the Spheres chimes sound wonderful and 'out of this world', but actually they are really a bit more 'out of this world' than I really wanted, and they are difficult for me to combine really effectively with the chimes from other sources. The reason is both the black finish, and, I think, a slightly greater thickness of the tube walls. These conspire to encourage a pronounced 'note' tone but to give it only weak higher harmonics. The sound, then, is penetrating, and carries further than my Woodstock 'silver' finish chimes, and it has a particularly ethereal quality, which many people would absolutely love, but it is not so good for my purposes, because it is more fatiguing to listen to fairly closely for extended periods as in my recordings. It lacks the 'sheen' and airiness of tone, then, that my Woodstock chimes have and I would really prefer. To put it another way, my Woodstock chimes have a shining, 'daylight' quality about their sound, whereas the Music of the Spheres chimes have something of a 'nocturnal' sound - beautiful but lacking in light.I recognised this issue before I made my purchase, but I still bought these chimes because I know of no other source for quality chimes with the Gypsy tuning, which I particularly wanted to use in some recordings. If Woodstock had been offering this tuning, especially in a 'silver' finish, I would have jumped for that instead.These Mezzo chimes have a much more ponderous and doleful sound than the soprano version, which is still haunting, but works really 'magically' when both versions are sounding together (which is particularly why I bought both versions).Because the the tone of these chimes is not fully 'there' for me, I rate them with four stars, but I would emphasize that for most people they would be a five-star job.Update, 19 November 2013:By putting the Gypsy Chimes further away from the recorder I succeeded in getting better balance and absolutely wonderful blends or at least interactions between the MOTS chimes and the Woodstock ones. The different scales naturally vary in compatibility, but the only combination that I found irredeemably discordant was the Gypsy Chimes plus the Woodstock Gregorian. Combining Gypsy with the Woodstock Chimes of Olympos produced a fascinating and invigorating harmonically spiky effect rather like many works of Bela Bartok, while combinations with Woodstock Chimes of Pluto, Polaris, Mercury and Mars were all exquisitely harmonious, the various slight pungencies making really invigorating musical experiences.

Beautiful melody

Beautiful tone. Other tinkling chimes drive me crazy. These are beautiful and when it's too windy out I just put the wind catcher part up in the metal circle to make them less noisy. If you are going to buy wind chimes this company is the one to buy from.

Beautiful sound, not tinny like cheap chimes. I have been wanting some decent wind chimes for quite a while now and finally decided to buy these. We hung them up on the breezy day and they sound wonderful.

Adore this chime.

Beautiful sound-just what we were looking for in a wind chime.

Best chimes in the world!